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Posted by Ed Murphy on 11/23/06 08:18
--CELKO-- wrote:
> You do not have a table at all; it is an attempt to mimic a deck of
> punch cards. You confuse columns and fields, rows and records
This would be a lot more helpful if you'd explain the difference (or
rather, since the explanation is probably long-ish, include a URL
where the explanation can be found).
> do these transactions create a customer or a sale?
*looks down* Oh, you're alluding to SalesTransactions being a better
name than CustTransactions. But are you sure? Customers may engage
in sales, returns, credit memos and debit memos (the latter two are
used to adjust the customer's balance without inventory changing hands,
e.g. if they were over/undercharged for something). Of course, stuffing
multiple types of transactions into a single table without an explicit
TransactionType column is a separate error, but perhaps the table
definition was simplified by omitting columns not directly relevant to
the task at hand.
> Why is there DDL in narratives?
Why wouldn't there be? How many questions lacking DDL receive
the initial response "please post DDL to create your tables and
populate them with data illustrating the issue"?
>>> What I would like to do is, for all of the records [sic] in descending order of "AmountSpent" where "CustSelected = TRUE", set CustSelected to FALSE
> such that the sum of all the AmountSpent records with CustSelected =
> TRUE is no greater than a specified amount (say $50,000). <<
> You did not say what to do about ties; if I have five sales of
> $50,000.00 which one would I mark?
This gap in the spec can be bridged by picking an arbitrary
rule (e.g. mark rows with lower TransactionKey first), on the
assumption that the questioner will be able to adjust that
part of the answer to fit whatever the actual rule is.
> give us a RELATIONAL spec and we can probably help you
This is a more general case of the above. "Your style is lousy,
so I'm going to point that out _and not answer your question_."
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